Thursday, January 18, 2007

Walt Whitman

We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.

From Leaves of Grass.

2 comments:

Will said...

How amazing that man was! You look at photographs of him, you read the poetry and wonder how one human being could have contained all that energy, eroticism, wisdom and love.

A Bear in the Woods said...

Whitman is one of the handful of poets that make up the core of my personal canon of scripture, my "other" scriptures, so to speak.